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September 29, 2006 http://gymkhana.iitb.ac.in/~insight
If an infinite number of monkeys are given typewriters for an infinite amount of time, they will eventually produce the complete works of Shakespeare. ~Infinite monkey theorem
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eaving this monkey business aside for a while, the first question that pops up in one’s mind when you discuss blogging is - why blog? Some people dismiss it as a self-indulgent waste of time, a narcissistic pursuit by people short of friends in real life; they do this on their own blogs of course. Some others hail it as a media revolution, an unparalleled platform for exchange of opinions and ideas, an outlet to showcase creativity. A few others say that it’s either blogging or standing in a public place and shouting into a megaphone. Blogging is by far the easier alternative then. Much like the quest for the answer to Life, Universe and everything else, even after innumerable discussions, dissertations and studies a definitive explanation remains elusive. Again like the ultimate question, it may be argued that it’s not needed anyway. Whatever be the motivations, one thing that can be ascertained for sure is that blogging is a very powerful medium to reach out to people and this fact is being exploited by companies, media networks and even political parties with great success. Blogs such as these, though, might well be classified as websites, given the content and motive. Apart from a few popular blogs which
What is a Zombie?
language and grammar, a tone of humour, sarcasm or satire, innovation coupled with creativity and regular updates are just few of the parameters that make a good blog
WE-BlOG
Blogging is one of the biggest revolutions to have hit the media in the past decade. Nikhil Chandra Jha gives you a taste of the immensely diverse blogosphere. travel accounts, personal poems, reviews, stories, cribs, rantings to transcripts of Gilmore Girls episodes or photographs of dressed up dogs and cats. Now unless these are cats resembling Hitler (go search!), there is no reason why anyone would like to visit these blogs. Except maybe a few loyal friends who have a sort of unspoken understanding of mutual reading and commenting. Other than putting the personal lives of bloggers at the mercy of search engines, there is little these daily disclosure type blogs achieve. The anonymous ones are often the more colourful ones, writing about exotic experiences and giving uninhibited opinions without having the burden of being accountable for them. A welcome change, but very often they tend to lack credibility. Thankfully, exceptions to these mindnumbing and mediocre blogs do exist. Very often, these are the ones that get noticed. Good content, a natural respect for
disk and stealing your passwords or private information.
Zishaan, who graduated from IITB in 2005, has a photoblog [http://www. hayath.com/ pointandshoot/] where he captures, rather beautifully, the world around through his camera lens. For his laudable efforts, he was nominated for ‘Best South East Asian/ Indian Photoblog’ at Photobloggies 2005 and 2006. J Ramanand, a current student in KreSIT and a past winner of BBC’s Mastermind India, maintains a well categorised and
been launched, it’s hard to stop. If the addresses are spoofed, you will have no way of knowing if they reflect the true source
of the attack until you track down some of the alleged sources.
Oh No! Help!
Sahal Merchant, a graduate from IDC, regularly puts his digital animations and sketches on his blog [http:// lightboxx.blogspot.com]. One of his animation shorts ‘The Bench’ bagged a special mention at the International Animation Day Awards 2005 in the students’ category.
Shantanu Godbole, who completed his PhD from KreSIT in 2006, runs a blog that is a foodie’s delight called Sigfood [http://www.sigfood.org]. Needless to say, it attracts a lot of people who enjoy and contribute to the wonderful compilation of food related articles and restaurant reviews. With such examples from a wide range of special interests to emulate, the standard of blogging in the campus is surely set to move north. So if you have a blog and are looking for ideas other than the ubiquitous daily descriptions, you don’t have to look too far. If you do not have a blog as yet, then well, what are you waiting for?
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Just as a parting note on the monkey business, this is what Stephen Colbert, of The Colbert Report fame, had to say about the infinite monkey theorem, “One million monkeys typing for eternity would produce Shakespeare, ten thousand (drinking) monkeys typing for ten thousand years would produce Hemingway, and ten monkeys typing for three days would produce Dan Brown.” I’m so glad Colbert is yet to read my blog.
ware like Moosoft’s The Cleaner which not only detects and prevents Trojans but also sounds an alarm when a change is made to your computer (which you might not have made). · Make sure your Windows is up to date with the latest critical updates and patches. Hackers have made it their goal to find vulnerabilities within Windows and exploit them. · Check if your computer’s antivirus has Trojan protection; if not, get things like Trojan Slayer from the net.
How To
A zombie is a computer that has been implanted with a Trojan horse that puts it under the control of a malicious hacker without the knowledge of the computer owner. You can think of a Trojan horse as a remote-control tool. It quietly sits in the background, waiting for you to go online, Zombies are used to launch DoS (Denial and for the hacker to load it. Trojans are far of Service) attacks that can bring a netmore sophisticated than viruses or worms, work down to its knees. The hacker sends and often allow a hacker unlimited access commands to the zombie through an open port like a to a comproFirewall: A software program that prevents intruders broadband mised machine. from entering a computer or network from the Interconnection. net. Anything entering or leaving a system protected by On comHow? a firewall is examined to see if it violates the system’s mand, the security standards. A firewall can also be set to prevent zombie comYou can infect unauthorised data from being sent out over the Internet puter sends your system from a user’s computer. an enormous with a Trojan amount of packets of useless and confushorse by clicking (and thereby executing information to a targeted website in ing) an e-mail attachment. Currently, these order to clog and cripple the site’s routers crooks’ weapons of choice are Trojan horse and keep legitimate users from gaining acprograms, which typically arrive as harmcess to the site. less programs or innocuous files such as JPEG images. Double-click the files, and A Distributed DoS occurs when several you launch a hostile program! computers are controlled by the hacker. As is obvious, this attack can be much more So what? dangerous to a server due to the fact that Once Trojan horses are installed, a hacker the attacks are more widespread, can tarcan do a range of things, from pranks such get multiple components on the server at as changing the look of your screen, de- the same time, and attack in parallel so leting and renaming files, to more serious that the server has to prevent all these atbreaches such as reformatting your hard- tacks at once. Once the DDoS attack has
stand out from the others. Given the factors that go into making a blog - a fair supply of free time, regular network access and most importantly an ample amount of intellectual grey matter, it is only natural to expect IITs to boast of some good bloggers. IITB, by extension, follows this rule. There are a host of people from IITB, both current students and alumni, who have chosen this medium to showcase their creativity and voice their opinions. Some of them are getting noticed too.
widely read blog [http://quatrainman. blogspot.com] which has a distinct trivia quotient to it along with reviews and opinions. He has also started a popular quizzing blog Interrobang [http://notesandstones. blogspot.com].
Leisure
We’ve all heard that a million monkeys banging on a million typewriters will eventually reproduce the entire works of Shakespeare. Now, thanks to the Internet, we know this is not true. ~Infinite monkey theorem gone wrong
pursue a definite purpose and pattern, the vast majority of blogs are personal blogs. These personal blogs contain anything from chronicles of day-to-day happenings,
· Implement router-based filtering - This is more for an ISP or businesses that use (Aaditya Ramdas can be contacted at high-end routers on their networks. aaditya.ramdas@iitb.ac.in) · Installing a Firewall may save your computer. Google for details. ·Consider partitioning your Did you know? hard drive in to smaller drives. This way, should # The Yahoo website was attacked at 10:30 PST on Feb 7th a DoS occur, it will not 2000. The attack lasted three hours. Yahoo was pinged at crash your hard drive but the rate of one gigabyte/second. only the partition being at- # The websites - amazon.com, buy.com, cnn.com, eBay. com were attacked on Feb 8th 2000. Each attack lasted tacked. · Monitor systems’ perfor- between one and four hours. CNN reported that the attack mance - Windows offers on its website was the first major attack since its website something called the ‘Task went online in August 1995. Manager’ that gives you # The websites of E*Trade, a stock broker, and ZDNet, a a diagnostic of your CPU computer information company, were attacked on Feb 9th and memory; and what 2000. processes are currently us- About fifty computers at Stanford University, and also ing them (Ctrl + Alt + De- computers at the University of California at Santa Barbara, were amongst the zombie computers sending lete keys). · Deploy detection soft- pings in these DoS attacks.